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dark hallway? We hid in the store’s restroom for a few minutes while I convinced myself that she was gone, but vigilance overtook me as we walked out of the store, and I remained on high alert all the way home.
~
I told no one about this experience. Not even my hus- band. But the memory haunted me for so many years, arising as I tried to fall asleep at night or when I heard some stranger danger story in the news. We moved away from Boston before Benjamin turned 2, but this memory still returned, my body offering it up again and again in the form of adrenaline in the gut that evolved into some kind of mysterious shame.
I even tried to banish the memory when I attended a training for EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). During a two-day workshop where therapists learned how to use this innovative treatment for trauma, we paired up with strangers and practiced on each other. Toward the end, the instructor told us to think of a mild trauma we’d experienced, to hold that in mind while our partners moved their hands across our visual fields as we “processed” the memory. I pictured the Natick Mall episode like a movie in my mind. Within seconds of starting the eye movements, tears arose, my throat closed, and I knew I should have chosen a different memory. I managed to stay with this one without dissolving into sobs, but the memory retained its emotional potency long after the EMDR ended.
~
What was it about this one experience that lodged itself so deeply in my body? Revisiting it over the years, I discovered this memory was a dark mine- shaft that held many layers of meaning for me, each one deeper than the next. It was a long excavation.
The top layer contained my terror: the feeling we live with after a close call, when we cannot stop thinking about what could have happened, when we go over and over the event, down to its tiniest details, trying to make sense of how we came back from the precipice unharmed. Luck, effort, quick thinking, divine intervention, skill: all of these enter into the calculations as we obsess about a narrow escape.
The next layer down revealed self-recrimination in all its guises. I told myself I was just a crazy woman for even briefly imagining that innocent girl held bad intentions toward my baby and me. I must be paranoid. I was so naïve and accommodating toward other people that I’d almost handed my child over to
a stranger, just because she asked. And ever polite, no matter what, I had even thanked her before I walked away. Never strong enough to say no when I needed to, now my weakness had endangered my son. What was wrong with me?
Beneath all of that, the understory was shame. The kind of shame that took over my body and slid itself into every crevice and pore, sliming me with the certainty that I was a bad mother. I’d suspected this about myself all along; how could a person who’d grown up with a depressed and remote mother like mine possibly possess the deep store of emotional supplies needed to be a good enough mother? Here was unassailable proof of my bad mothering in the form of a bare inch of space between Benjamin’s body and mine. Danger loomed and my first action was
the opposite of protecting my son. Condemned by an inch, the guilt hung on my shoulders, a dead weight I could not set down.
~
I couldn’t see until many years later that I had ig- nored the most important part of this memory: the outcome. I may have moved Benjamin toward this
girl by the smallest margin, but I had kept him safe. In the very next second, my protective impulse, and my boundless love for him, had kicked in. I had held him close and I had said no. I had brought us through the moment of danger. With this realization came relief and the banishment of this memory to the dustbin of my mind. Or so I thought.
~
After Benjamin died when he was 23, the mall memo- ry came around again, bearing awful questions about why I hadn’t been able to protect my son this time.
Is keeping our children safe not the very essence of parenting? Why hadn’t I gone into his room to check on him the night he died, or the next morning? What had I neglected to worry about that might have been prevented? What talisman did I not provide for his protection? What if? What if?
I realized quickly that these kinds of questions would make it impossible to survive my son’s death. Moth- ers did not go into the bedrooms of their adult sons to
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